I am loathe to write about Grand Theft Auto V, and yet here it is Wednesday morning, and I am on a deadline, and I know I’m going to have to write about it because it’s the only thing my brain is going to let me talk about until I excise these opinions. It’s like when my four-year-old asks for dessert before he’s finished his brussel sprouts. It’s just not going to happen, pal.

Well, writing about Grand Theft Auto V is eating my brussel sprouts, so let’s just get through this with minimum pain.

The other thing I know is that before I get to the opinions part, I need to write a review of GTA 5, because until you’ve written one of those, a subset of readers will assume any comment is a review. So, let’s get that out of the way too.

Grand Theft Auto V – Review

GTA 5 is perhaps the most expensive game ever made, and the sheer magnitude of the accomplishment delivered by Rockstar cannot be understated. It delivers again and again with next-generation graphics on an Xbox 360/PS3, clean and easy to use mechanics, a complicated and engaging narrative, and, above all else, a dense, living world with endless things to do. It’s the kind of game you could spend weeks or months with and still feel like you haven’t seen everything, even exceeding games like Skyrim in the breadth and depth of its world.
Objectively, the game not only delivers on the core of what defines the Grand Theft Auto series, it is arguably as much an evolution of the open-world gameplay model as GTA 3 was when it launched on the PlayStation. It’s like watching a bumble bee fly; you wonder how it doesn’t collapse under its own weight, how the Rockstar team didn’t succumb to simply losing themselves or their direction under the tangled web of game systems, and yet there it is, flying like an insult to God, defying every rule you thought you knew.

In short, as a video game and a technological achievement, GTA 5 is brilliant.